When I started hiking the AT in 2002, I was 54 years old. I’d been married to Virginia since 1970, and we had two great kids who had recently both graduated from college. Virginia and I met at Penn State, where we both graduated in 1969, she with high distinction in elementary education. I was in the top five fifths of my class in the business school. We settled in Allentown, Pennsylvania. It was the big city for me, growing up in Boyertown, Pennsylvania, twenty miles down the road. Virginia was from Westfield, New Jersey. She went to Gettysburg College for a year before transferring to Penn State. Virginia taught first grade for seven years before we had Ben and Bethany. I went to work for a local CPA firm in 1969. I was a much better accountant than I was a student. I passed the CPA exam in 1972 on my first try, and became a partner in the firm in 1975. In many ways, I was in the right place at the right time. I have had only that one job. For over thirty years, building my career and family was my main focus. I worked hard and put in long hours. Long hours were an expected part of the profession at the time.
Benjamin was born in 1978, and Virginia has been raising the family ever since. She is the glue and support system for all of us. Ben was always a special kid. He’s spoken like an adult since he was three. He was always good in school. He played some soccer and was on the high school tennis team. I coached his youth baseball team when he was 8 to 10 years old. He took piano lessons for four years, and then switched to the French horn. He was an all-state band French horn player. Ben scored 1560 on his SATs (800 in math) and was accepted to the Penn State honor’s college on a full tuition scholarship. When he finished in December of 2000, he was the student marshal of the business school, graduating with the highest GPA of the thousand or so students. He went to work for a boutique consulting firm in New York City. After about five years, he gave up the road warrior life for a job in sourcing with a large national industrial gas company. He and his wife Michelle gave us our first grandchild, John, in October of 2011.
Our daughter Bethany was born in 1980, and always had her dad wrapped around her little finger. She would dispute that. She was quiet, since Ben was more verbal and tended to dominate family dinner. That changed later. Bethany started piano lessons about a year after Ben, and took off to be a star pianist in the area. She accompanied the elementary, junior high and high school chorus’ and won the area “Friends of Music” competition. She won another competition, with the prize being organ lessons, and during her high school years she was an organist at a small local church. I was her softball coach in local youth leagues for nine years, from ages 9 to 17. I coached one more year without her, but coaching was not the same after she gave up the sport. Bethany got some scholarships to go to Indiana University in Bloomington Indiana as a piano performance major. She graduated in just three years, in 2001. She had strong communication and interpersonal skills, and to combine those with her love of music, she got a job in sales with Steinway and Sons in the New York City area. She paid her dues in a retail showroom and visiting churches, but in four years became the institutional sales manager for the New York metro area. Juilliard and Yale became her customers. She married her best friend from college, Kevin, in 2005.
But that’s enough about me and my family. Why did I start to hike the trail? I was a Boy Scout until I was sixteen. I never made Eagle, but was the last step (Life) before it. I was also “Order of the Arrow”, but remembered little of that. When I was about 14, in the summer of 1962, I did go to the National Boy Scout Camp, Philmont, in New Mexico. We were out on the trail for about ten days, with a four day bus ride each way. Since high school, I really had not camped or hiked at all. Virginia and the kids never showed any interest, nor did I. We had traveled some, and did Yosemite and maybe a few other parks, but that was it. I was not necessarily looking for something, or felt like something was missing. Even though Ben and Bethany were out on their own and had good jobs with their own health insurance, I felt like I had plenty to do with working, and a full client load. I had grass to cut and golf on weekends. Then, two events may be what set things in motion.
First, my Kiwanis club in Emmaus, Pennsylvania had an AT thru-hiker as a speaker sometime over the winter of 2001-2002. He was an early 20-something and had the usual slide show. I don’t remember his talk being particularly inspiring. It was probably not his fault, since his audience were a bunch of ROMEOs (Really Old Men Eating Out). But somehow, the idea of hiking part of the AT was intriguing. It kind of stuck that, if I would hike, it would be with a point of working toward some kind of goal. I would have no interest in hiking just a random trail and coming home and saying that was nice. But, hiking some part of the AT, say, all of Northern Pennsylvania, from the Susquehanna to the Delaware, had an appeal to me. It may have stopped there, but then…
The second event was in May of 2002. I had always loved pictures of Banff in the Canadian Rockies, so Virginia and I took a trip up there. We bought hiking shoes before we went, but really did not need them for the things we did. It seemed like there was a lot of hiking going on, but Virginia clearly was not interested in hiking. Although she would have been happy to let me go off on my own for a day, it did not seem like the Canadian Rockies was a place to learn to hike. We took the gondola up to the top of the mountain near Banff, and I was amazed that people actually hiked up or down the mountain instead of taking the gondola. This almost seemed like suicide. It seemed steep and difficult, and like it would take forever. I think it was a few miles long, and up a few thousand feet.
We drove the Icefields Parkway up to Jasper National Park and stayed there a few days before driving back to Banff. The mountains and lakes were all gorgeous throughout the entire area. We toured around in the rented Jeep. We stopped off at many vistas, but never really had to walk very far. We saw a lot of wildlife. Elk roamed the streets of Banff, and deer were all over Jasper. We walked around the Jasper resort lake during elk rutting season, which horrified Virginia to no end. Female elk are particularly ornery during rutting season. From the dining room, we saw a bear dive into the lake. We even spotted a moose and a wolf on our drive back from Jasper. I think I was becoming hooked on the outdoors.
We came home from Banff, and I joined the Appalachian Trail Conference (as it was called at the time). I bought the book and map set for the AT in Pennsylvania. The ATC publishes very complete book and map sets for each state or pair of states. They can be found through the ATC website or in many bookstores. I loved looking at the maps. After reading the do’s and don’ts of hiking, and studying the maps endlessly, I scheduled my first day.
